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Category: Content & Blogging

Ask and answer questions around the topic of content development for SEO.


  • Completely agree with the above two answers. I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole if I was you!

    | Casey_Bryan
    0

  • Lots of people grab content and republish it. Lots of people grab the same content and republish it. The first few people who do it have the best chance of getting away with it.  But, if you are the tenth or the twentith, then you are more likely to be ignored by Google.  (After you republish this duplicate, Google might find it, index it, and rank it... then some months down the road they realize that your stuff is duplicate and take action against it.) The exception to the above is when you are a powerful publisher.  Then you can get away with a lot more than other republishers, and you might even outrank the original source. "If you've realized that your local industry is riddled with poor quality content, see this as your opportunity to beat out lazier competitors. If you deliver the superior experience, it may give you a very valuable edge, while also safeguarding your reputation and rankings against Google filters and penalties in future." This is so true and so surprising.  There are still a lot of topics on the internet that are not covered by substantive, high quality content written by an authoritative author.

    | EGOL
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  • I haven't got experience with any plugins to help users login before posting but I definitely have experience with WP Blog comments and spammers, so hopefully, I could offer some helpful advice. I've been accepting blog comments on our companies WP sites and one of the sites has received 6500+ comments, all from genuine readers. We did see a lot of spam at the beginning but I didn't want to make my readers jump through hoops to leave a comment. I disabled the URL field and if you go to Settings > Discussions in the admin panel, you can list all the words that you would like flagged as spam. I'm currently approving 20+ comments daily and I see no spam in the pending section, all the spam is filtered into spam box and I empty it weekly.

    | AjazMozPro
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  • So if my site is within a week old, I have 15 or so articles already published under the new site. I'm just trying to grasp this here. I think your saying I should have 1 subdomain for my blog and the main domain is the actual website?

    | Pure710
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  • I would release the guide as soon as it's approved so can get indexed. Also, write verbiage on expected eta. Often times, these eta's are not made, so be broad: expected release q2 2018 or whatever.  Good idea to create a sign-up form to collect emails so you can send off updates & firm release dates. Good luck!

    | KevinBudzynski
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  • Great question Swendt! Linking from your blog to your product page or other blog post is a great SEO practice, as long as it is in moderation. People tend to disagree on what that is, but I've seen having 2-3 internal links, as well as 2-3 external links in a 500-1000 word blog post be a great SEO benefit. Internal linking is an often overlooked SEO strategy that can help distribute authority to page's you want to rank on Google and be visited when someone is on your website, just make sure the links are relevant, helpful, and that you don't have so many that it hurts the user's perception of your blog quality.

    | NickW816
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  • I would agree with you, there are pros and cons. One site I keep up with almost religiously is backlinko.com. Brian Dean is a popular SEO thought leader. If you checkout his post sitemap, you'll see he only has around 30 posts - one on just about every topic. You'll find that each post wholly answers his users' questions, with examples, further resources, media, and more. In my opinion, this is the direction the internet is heading. One exhaustive post on a popular topic in your industry, updated yearly, is going to outperform (in terms of overall traffic and individual ranking) 4-5 posts on one single topic. So, the pros of lots of posts on one topic might be the potential of having multiple, specific long tail keywords rank and the opportunity to have a specific and quick answer to multiple searchers' queries. But the big con is that none of those posts will have a great chance of ranking well for a high volume keyword. Hope this helps!

    | brooksmanley
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  • You've asked a great question, Wagada. The fact that the version of the content on Constant Contact's page has already been indexed does mean that you'll have a duplicate content challenge, but there are ways to address it. The whole problem with duplicate content is not that it generates some kind of penalty, (it doesn't) it's just that search engines then have to decide which of the dupe pages they should point to in the search results. The version you publish on your own site already has several things going for it, and you need to add additional signals to help the search engines prioritise your site's version. First, at least part of the rest of your site is probably already talking about the same topics, so there will be more relevance there than from the random topics on Constant Contact. Plus, if your newsletter is like most, it will be linking back to your site, giving the SEs another signal. The biggest thing you can do to get your site's page considered as the canonical (primary) version is to get at least a few links pointing to it. Social media links can be very useful for this, especially from Google Plus, but a solid link or two from other sites will go a long way as well. Also, make sure your page does NOT link to the CC page - that way there's a clear authority signal that only travels one way. For future reference, if you're going to publish newsletter content on your own site, there are a couple of steps to take in preparation. Publish the content on your own site a day or a couple of days in advance Use the Fetch and Render tool in GSC to help it get crawled and indexed before sending the newsletter (SEs take "first published" date into account when trying to ascertain which page to return in results.) Make sure it's strongly-linked internally - maybe even put a link to the newsletter content page on your homepage before sending the newsletter Get a few incoming links to the newly-published page before the newsletter goes out. Use the newly published page's address in the newsletter's preheader text link where it says "If not showing up well in your email, you can read this in your browser" so the dupe page actually links back to the page you want to be considered primary. Or best yet, do the above and also turn off the newsletter archive on Constant Contact altogether and make the prepublished page on your site the only version. This is the best, but obviously takes a bit more work and preparation to pre-publish. It also offers the massive benefit of delivering those newsletter viewers who do want to read in a browser to your own pages where you can induce further activity/conversions. Though it should be said that in the newsletters I've managed, very few people click the "view in browser" links anymore anyway. Hope all that makes sense? Paul

    | ThompsonPaul
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  • Hi Jamie, Are you sure that there was a crawl since you've made the changes? In addition it would probably be useful if you could tell us where we might see the changes so we can help you debug a bit more. Martijn.

    | Martijn_Scheijbeler
    0

  • Personally I think it's a bad idea, I tried it and it was a waste of time, 0 results. My time is better spent improving the quality of our websites, adding rich content and building links. It's my understanding that 3rd party blogging site are not indexed by Google anyway. Just my opinion, hope it helps KJr

    | KevnJr
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  • Hello there! Google does not use Meta description as a ranking factor. So you wont be penalized for having duplicates. But, having good texts there can make a difference as it is the text to likely be shown in SERPs. Here some extra info: The Wonderful World of SEO Meta Tags [Refreshed for 2017] - Google Webmasters Central  Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking - Moz Blog Best Luck! GR.

    | GastonRiera
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  • Hi there, It is not a bad signal if you are in fact deleting low-value content that does not drive traffic or back links. Content is becoming more of a 'quality over quantity' game (thankfully). If you are making your site more efficient for Google to crawl and condensing SEO authority (link juice) and pointing more of that your more 'important' pages, you could actually see an uptick in business from organic search. I will note that you should look at your blog posts to see if there are opportunities to update them to make them more informative and/or more current. If any of the posts you are removing have inbound links or rankings, you will want to properly 301 redirect them. Take a look at these resources where sites removed old pages and maintained site performance or even saw an uptick. The content audit portion of your analysis is going to be crucial, you must be sure you are not deleting content that is driving traffic. How Deleting Bad Blog Post Content Can Increase Traffic - Why We Deleted 900 Blog Posts And What Happened Next Why Deleting Old Blog Posts Help My Website Grow Hope this helps!

    | Joe_Stoffel
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  • Canonical tag isn't likely to have the effect you want here. Search engines expect (require) that conicalised pages be essentially identical to each other or they will likely ignore the canonical "suggestion". Identical meaning essentially word for word, except for perhaps word order, like on parameter-sorted product category p[ages. In my experience, EGOL's solution is vastly superior. Create a permanent page for each, then find all the old related blog posts and redirect them to the permanent page to harness whatever authority those pages have for the new one. That way all further authority to the same page year after year, instead of being diffused amongst many weak separate pages. Paul

    | ThompsonPaul
    1

  • Hi, I'd use social media - Twitter, Facebook. If you have good images you could also use Instagram and in the accompanying text say that there's a post about it over on your site. I'd look at what others have done by searching the keywords on that social media platform and seeing what comes up. if they used a good hook or hashtag then use that in your post too. You could post a few times on your chosen platforms with different text each time and see what works best - don't overdo the posting though as people will get annoyed. If your topic ties in with something upcoming eg a national awareness day or big event, make sure you post during that period and use the relevant hashtags (which you can usually research before).

    | Houses
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  • Hi James, thanks for the response. Didn't Google stop using authorship? - http://searchengineland.com/google-stop-using-authorship-completely-even-indepth-articles-252480

    | SocialB
    0

  • It's in the Yoast settings Thomas.  Titles & Meta's >> Taxonomies I'm astounded I had never thought of this as the solution to my own issue.  Thanks to everyone above.

    | formerfatguy
    0

  • You used to be able to do this in the YouMoz section of the Moz Blog at https://moz.com/ugc. However, the last post was almost a year ago, and according to a note on https://moz.com/posts/ugc_guidelines, the submission process is closed for the time being.

    | LureCreative
    1

  • No there is no harm, just keep in mind that content creation is only 50% of what matters, make sure each piece of content is properly promoted through social media, blog aggregators, publishing websites, etc. When publishing a lot of content at once, it can be easy for some pieces of content to not be properly promoted.

    | LureCreative
    0

  • Thanks for the heads up! Cant wait until its back up.

    | WebMarkets
    0